Tempus Fugit
by verisimilitude9
Summary: Time disappears. Four men grow up in vastly different places, destined to lead very different lives. And yet, from childhood on, each of them has dreams and visions of girls they have never met. Senshi/shitennou.
1. Book One: Kunzite

A/N: Yeah, so, a new series of sorts from me! Don't worry, loves, still working on the R/J and M/N fics of the Magnolias In Bloom/Laws Of Attraction story arc. Eventually I'll get around to them. But... yes. Here's something new and somewhat experimental, so hopefully y'all like!

Disclaimer: Same ol' same ol'.

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_You're still searching for me in every woman._

I.

The air is hot and smells sharply of salt and drying seaweed and carefully pitched wood. Five-year-old Kareem Al-Hassan can barely sit still, taking in all the sights and sounds and smells and feelings of being on _Abee_'s boat for the first time. His father is humming, an old Moroccan folk song that is both cheerful and sad, and underneath a small fez and a cap of straight black hair, Kareem's face is all wide-eyed fascination as _Abee_ pulls up the nets, dripping with water and bits of kelp, breaking the surface of the blue water and sending drops splashing sun-glossed gold as he pulls up the squirming, silver-skinned fish.

Something about the colour of the golden sun reflecting in the water draws his eye almost more than the struggling, flopping fishes that are his family's livelihood, and he doesn't know why.

II.

"Monsieur Pierre!" The ten-year-old boy smiles and dashes up to a boat being anchored at the dock. Kareem does not spend most of his days by the water any more as he did in his earlier childhood, but it is summer, and the crusty old French sailor chuckles gruffly as the boy approaches.

"Your _père_ says that you are at the top of your class in both mathematics and languages," Pierre Benoit's skin is almost as dark as an Arab's from long days at sea, but his hair is a pale straw blond. Underneath his bushy moustache, his smile is even wider than Kareem's. "I don't suppose you told your classmates who your real French teacher is?"

"They don't understand," Kareem says with that mixture of levity and gravitas that characterizes young, particularly precocious children, then pulled something out of his pocket to show the old sea salt. "Look! _Abee_ bought me glasses. They are to help me read."

The glasses are cheap, with plain plastic frames, but when Kareem puts them on, they just seem to magnify his inquisitive eyes. The sailor, one of many who have known the fisherman's son for years, chuckles again and digs through his knapsack. "I brought you something from Italy."

"Another picture?" Kareem perks up. All the men here, who have the opportunity to travel farther than his own father ever will, bring him back postcards from distant shores. Pierre usually has the best ones.

The boy falls silent when the glossy sheet of thin cardboard is placed in his hands, and feels a chill down his spine. It is a painting, likely a famous one, with girls throwing rose petals and dancing in a lush spring garden, but his gaze is immediately drawn to the figure right in the center, a carnelian cape cascading down her back, her blue eyes tranquil and all-too-knowing under a coronet of golden hair.

"This is a famous painting called _Primavera_, by an artist named Botticelli who lived hundreds of years ago. The cold wind of March pursues the nymph of the Spring even as Flora covers the land with flowers and the Graces dance in the sunlight. And watching over and rejoicing as the world wakes up from its winter slumber, Venus presides over the scene."

_Venus_. Something about the name echoes in his mind like a gunshot. Behind his brand-new glasses, if Pierre could see them, his eyes are suddenly haunted and too-old.

And yet, this postcard he looks at more often than any of the others.

III.

London is a completely different world than Morocco, and it takes him more than a month to get used to the fog and the chilly weather. But that is a small price to pay for the opportunity to study at the prestigious London School of Economics. For a young man whose family had lived by the sweat of their brow catching fish for the last five generations, whose parents had hoarded a week's earnings to travel to Casablanca to procure him a passport to travel to another country, it is a prospect more amazing than words can express.

Kareem is on scholarship, studying International Relations, and throws himself into his work with verve and single-minded sincerity. Aside from a twice-a-week sojourn to a local cafe for a hot chocolate (a pleasant surprise in the otherwise-bland world of English cuisine) and a weekly phone call to his mother, he does not socialize on a regular basis. The classes are interesting and challenging, the competition fierce, and a part of him that has only recently been given voice is coldly, almost viciously determined to finish first against all odds.

But he decides, about three months after his arrival, to accept the invitation of a few classmates to catch a film at the cinema. They agree on an arthouse film from France, in the original language with English subtitles, with deep philosophical subtexts and renowned actors, and locate good seats in the theatre.

Kareem's mind is still mostly on the paper for his Sociology class as the previews start playing, but he looks up in time to see a blonde girl with eyes like blue lightning behind a blood-red domino mask vault, catlike, from the top of a three-story building to tackle a brutish thug lurking in the alley. "Code Name: Sailor V!" the voiceover speaks over the gritty, pulsing beat of rock music. "Coming to theatres next July."

"What a bunch of mindless self-indulgence," One of his female classmates, a honey-blonde with sharp features and raggedly-bitten nails scoffs. "It's bound to be another insipid comic book adaptation with too many explosions and a plot as flimsy as a sheet of tissue paper. I am SO glad we are not watching THAT."

Kareem barely hears her through the roaring that fills his mind like a freight train, and doesn't remember any of the film they watch. For a moment, through time and space and wire-frame glasses and a red mask and a silver screen, his eyes meet the blue ones of the girl on the screen and something wondrous and terrible takes hold. The girl is beautiful, beguiling, but something about her unsettles and terrifies him as much as though the words "Run away" are etched over and over again on her skin.

From that day, he finds himself searching, without even thinking about it, for _her_ if-only-he-knew-who in every blonde he sees.

From that night, the dreams begin.

IV.

He finishes his studies with honours several years later and is almost immediately offered a job as an interpreter in New York City, and he accepts the work, another new world, another country.

But even as the airplane flies across the ocean and he sleeps fitfully in a seat too small for his tall form, visions of blonde hair and blue eyes and golden chains follow and flare like a flashbomb through his subconscious.

V.

Kareem calls his mother once a week, dutifully, regardless of his location. It is a habit wrought of a promise and he is methodical to a fault. It is his third year in New York City, and the job pays more than adequately. His apartment a sleek, pristine loft, the car he drives is a black Mercedes Benz with leather seats and spotlessly shiny windows. And he knows for a fact that the money that he sends back to his parents could buy her a much better telephone, one that does not sound scratchy with static.

He tells her so when he calls her. It is bright and early, a sunny Saturday morning in Morocco, and he knows that his father will already be out in the boat, casting the nets. In Manhattan, it is not so early, not so sunny. He had worked until almost midnight before falling into a fitful sleep, only to waken at four in the morning, vivid images of sharp blue eyes and sun-kissed hair and laughter that turns into a jarring scream flashing behind his eyelids. After an hour of tossing and turning, he had picked up the phone.

"I can hear you just fine, _habibi_," his mother tells him, and her voice is still the same as it has always been. "I do not need to spend your hard-earned money on a new piece of machinery."

He makes more than the cost of a phone in the space of half an hour, but she brushes away this factoid as though it is nothing, and he sighs in frustration. Instead, she asks him if he is happy, and if he is eating well, and if the next time that he calls, he will tell her of finding a good girl with a gentle temperament who would be a good mother to his children.

She is his mother, and he loves her devotedly, but he can't find the words to tell even her about the face that haunts his dreams and nightmares, the blue-eyed blonde whose identity is ever a mystery, who probably does not have a gentle temperament at all.

He tells no one, and throws himself whole-heartedly into his work. The rich and powerful begin to know his name, and he is invited to several glamourous affairs. He accepts- it would be foolish not to, and moreover, distractions are welcome in the face of illogical flights of fancy. The striking, redheaded woman who introduces herself as the governor's personal assistant compliments him on his skills, and listens with flattering interest to the story of his beginnings. Something about her gives him an uneasy feeling, though not the same sort as the dream-girl blonde.

He steps outside, waits for the valet to pull up with his car, and his head is spinning though he barely touched the champagne. As he takes a seat on a bench underneath the glaring white moon, his mind fills with the horrifying image of an Arabian scimitar slicing through a strange yellow-and-white bodysuit, blood splattering and spraying everywhere as she stares up at him with bleak blue eyes. Time slows into a crawl, stretching like a rubber band just before it breaks, and the girl falls-falls-falls in an arc of red blood and yellow hair.

It is the last thing he sees.

VI.

_Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep._

The noise, or perhaps something else, wakes him. The walls are white and narrow, and the bed is just this side of uncomfortable. There is no sound aside from the beeping and his own breathing, and it takes a minute for him to realize that he's in a hospital room.

The beeping comes from the machine hooked up to his body and monitors his heart.

"You're awake." The sound of a woman's voice- smooth and low, with a subtle accent that even he cannot place- has him sitting up, reaching for a pair of glasses that he knows to be his resting on a nightstand. There is a faint, phantom pain in his chest and an IV drips something into his right arm, but he focuses on the woman. She is beautiful- tall and stately, clad in a sophisticated black pantsuit and high heels. Her dark hair falls sleek down her back and she wears no jewelry aside from a garnet and silver lapel pin in the shape of an antique key, and he can't place her at all. She affords him a smile that he instinctively knows is rare. "My name is Trista Mason. What do you remember?"

He remembers his name, his address. He remembers a dinner party and a phone call to his mother. He remembers recurrent dreams of a girl who is never quite within reach, a musical laugh, the scent of exotic flowers that he cannot name drifting through soft blonde hair. He remembers a blurry image of a man with black hair and archaic armour. Nothing is clear; each memory bleeds into the next like chalk drawings in the rain, and he has no idea why he is in the hospital.

His voice is scratchy from disuse and his words fall incoherently, without any sense, but she nods in acceptance, opens a small notepad and jots down a few words.

"How do you feel?"

There is an ache in his chest, and his legs feel heavy, as though they have not been used in a very long time. Gingerly, he rubs a spot over his heart that feels as though it had been ripped through with a blade, and then sees something else in his peripheral vision.

His hair, which had been short, precisely cut and black the last morning he woke up, is long enough to fall past his shoulder-blades. And it is the white of freshly fallen snow.

But before he can even ask about that, or about the day-by-day calendar on the wall which reads "April 24th, 2011" (a whole _four years_ and six-or-so months after the last time he'd called his mother), the face of the blonde flickers back to life behind his eyelids, and a crushing sense of guilt swoops down upon him like a flood. Mute and terrified, he turns to the woman who calls herself Trista Mason, because no one else is around to help or to explain.

She reaches over, and places one surprisingly warm hand over his. "You're alive. We were worried for a while that you would not make it. That, at least, is a start. You can fix things later."

The disorientation and panic and the hole in his memories prevents him from noticing that she _knows_ he needs to fix something and wondering at her knowledge. She pushes the button on the remote by his bed to summon a nurse, and leaves silently.

VII.

"Steady now. You've been asleep for a very long time, and it will be a while before your muscles recover."

The woman called Trista Mason has taken to visiting him a few times a week, generally when the doctors and nurses are off seeing others. Though she has no answers for him, something about her is reassuring. She is present when he discovers the scars on his chest, and when he lies awake at night, plagued by guilt that he cannot understand and the phantom pain of being stabbed. She brings him his personal effects and several years' worth of mail, and lets him open the parcels and envelopes with postage stamps from Morocco in sympathetic, discreet silence.

She listens with the sort of understanding that doesn't try to comfort with platitudes as he rambles like a madman about blonde hair and bloody scimitars and unfinished business, and encourages him to heal, physically.

Today he is taking his first step in five years, and it is in the middle of the night. Certainly the physical therapist will be around in the morning to do this properly, but he has gone too long in this state of inaction. She sits, watching him with her fathomless burgundy eyes, but does not offer a hand as he shakily stands. One foot in front of the other, and he's already shaky with exhaustion.

"The first step is always the hardest," she pours him a glass of water and motions for him to take a seat back on his bed. "It will be easier now."

"Perhaps," Kareem murmurs between gulps of water. "I still feel so lost. I don't even know if I have a job any more."

"I daresay that your former employers will be happy to have you back, though you shall not have to worry about it quite yet." She slides forth a manila envelope before refilling his glass. "Your investments paid off. You are quite comfortably well-off, not that you weren't before."

He gapes at the statements and figures printed on the sheets of paper, and she stands. "I think you will have many options in regards to what you wish to do with your life after you leave from here, Kareem Al-Hassan. Choose well."

He listens to the click of her high heeled shoes down the hallway until the sound fades into silence. And when he falls asleep, for the first time since he awoke in a hospital bed, he doesn't see visions of blood and death.

One step leads to two to three to dozens. He makes numerous phone calls and arranges to sell his loft. He quits his job, sells his Mercedes, and buys a plane ticket to Casablanca. It is illogical, unwise, probably insane, but when he is given a clean bill of health at last, he walks out of his hospital room with his head held high, silvery hair combed back to brush his shoulders.

He stops at the reception desk; it has been a month since he last saw Trista Mason. He had barely noticed her absence during the frenetic days of physical therapy and the complete rearrangement of his life and affairs, but now he feels vaguely as though he should leave a message, one of thanks.

The desk clerk looks up with a perky smile that falters when she hears his request, and then frowns as she types something into her computer.

"We don't have a Trista Mason employed in this hospital in any capacity, sir, nor any social workers by that name affiliated with us. I'm not sure I know anyone bearing the description you gave, though I might be wrong."

Kareem's protests die on the tip of his tongue. Illogical things no longer surprise him any more.

VIII.

His town is much as he remembered it, with its narrow streets and noisy buyers and sellers haggling over produce and fish and live chickens and household goods on market day. He had not informed anyone of his arrival, and the taxi from Casablanca's airport only takes him so far. Several give the tall, stern-looking man with hair too pale for his colouring and his age a wide berth as he walks the rest of the way, out of place and solitary in his western-style suit.

There are boats, more of the modern motorized variety than the traditional fishing vessels of his youth, anchored to the docks or sailing within view on the sea. He sees a familiar figure, unloading crates, and walks forward.

Old Pierre Benoit's hair is now more gray than blond, but his eyes are still shrewd, with the corners deeply creased from laughter and sun, and the arms that push a dolly of wooden crates down a ramp are still wiry and strong. His eyes meet Kareem's, and after a moment, the leathery, sun-bronzed face breaks into a wide grin.

"Still top of your class in languages, _mon ami_?" Pierre asks, clapping Kareem heartily on the back. "Your father tells us about how well you have done for yourself, travelling the world and working for the most powerful people in America." The Frenchman gestures towards his boat, a sleeker and larger model than the one Kareem remembers from his childhood. "He loaned me the money you sent him one year to buy a new boat after the other was destroyed in a storm, but he never buys a bigger one for himself. Still, he and your mother must be pleased to see you home after such a long time."

Kareem drops his gaze, his hair falling forward like untimely white frost in his peripheral vision. "I've not spoken to them in a long time."

"_Mais Oui_. Your father told me," Pierre says without an iota of surprise. "A lady from a hospital contacted them to let them know that you had collapsed, overwork perhaps, with some physical trauma. But it was about three months ago that she called again to let them know that you were recovering, and that they would hear from you soon." The old sea salt surveys the younger man for several seconds. "Pah, it is not worth gambling your health or your happiness for the sake of ambition, my young friend. But it is good that you are well and have returned."

Kareem does not ask who the woman is; he does not have to. His purpose for returning comes back to the forefront of his mind, and he clears his throat. "Well, I daresay that I will be here for a while. I should go to my parents'."

Pierre nods, squinting against the sunlight before expelling his breath in a long puff. "Before you go, I have something for you."

Kareem watches as the old sailor digs through his battered knapsack and extracts a stack of postcards, some yellowed with age, capturing the most beautiful places in the world in all their glory. The sun sets over the Golden Gate Bridge in streaks of gold-and-rose like a beautiful woman's flowing hair and delicate skin. Graceful maidens support the roof and beams of a pristine Greek temple. A delicate patch of plum blossoms bloom amidst bitter winter snows and adversity in an Oriental garden. Dazzling birds of paradise fly over lush greenery in a tropical rain forest. Kareem knows without telling that Pierre has saved them throughout the years, and the pack of thin cardboard photographs means more to him than all the money he has ever made in his life.

"I will keep these, and treasure them, and teach other children about these places the way you have taught me," he tells the old sailor quietly. There is a sting in his eyes like tears, but he can't bring himself to feel ashamed.

Pierre smiles, and his eyes, too, are damp. "Go surprise your parents."

IX.

The village leader is one of his former classmates, and seems to be slightly intimidated by his presence and the almost mythical wealth he is purported to have attained in the US. Selwan Nazari is slightly mystified as to why Kareem would give it all up, but upon hearing the latter's thoughts, is more than willing to get onboard with the plans, and gives Kareem an "office"- really a chipped old desk with a telephone in a room in his house, to use at his disposal. There is no air conditioning and the wood of the desk is splintery with age, but Kareem feels more fulfillment with the work he does there more than any he'd ever done in more plush surroundings.

With Selwan's help, they work fast. The first of the pipes arrive within a week. After a month, the villagers become accustomed to the sight of men in denims setting up irrigation and running water through their lands and homes. After three, most of the work is done, and it is no longer strange and miraculous to the children that turning a knob over a faucet causes water to flow out.

Kareem tours the schools that he went to in his youth, tearing down dilapidated buildings and putting up new ones, buying desks and chalkboards and books. He even teaches a class or two himself in the mornings, and makes good on his promise to Pierre to teach little children about the places and worlds beyond their own.

In the afternoons, he helps his father clean the freshly-caught fish and fillet it for the market, and in the evenings, he sands lumber and pitches planks to help repair any number of old fishing boats, including their own. His hands become rough and strong from the work and in his dreams, the girl is smiling again, as though in approval. Her face is so achingly beautiful that it almost hurts to look at her, but in all this time, in all his travels, he has not found her yet.

But in the very least, he has some semblance of peace. One year after he was given a clean bill of health by the hospital in New York, he eats fish tagine with preserved lemons and green olives and pours mint tea for his mother. She has still not purchased a new telephone, but she smiles at him with her wise eyes and runs her gentle fingers over his still-white hair.

"I am proud of you, _habibi_."

He knows that she speaks more of the work he has done in the past year than any of the accolades and prestige he might have earned in the past. His work has attracted the attention of several politicians and news agencies, but he always lets Selwan take the spotlight and does not sit for any interviews. There are other, bigger things than fame or glory.

X.

The next day, as he steps out of one of the school buildings he's renovated, he pauses at the side of the road as a Jeep comes to a stop, windows down, as the schoolchildren cross the street. He has one moment to register that the woman at the wheel- dark-haired, stately, clad in black- looks familiar, before he hears it.

The song on the radio could be any popular tune sung by any female singer with a sweet voice, and he doesn't pay much mind to such things. But the words reach him-

_-"Here comes the feeling that you thought you'd forgotten.  
Sometimes we're broken and we don't know why.  
I keep dreaming, and I want to be  
Your favourite hello and your hardest goodbye." -_

The Jeep drives past, out of earshot, and the song pokes a hole in the dam of memories that are-yet-are-not his.

He does not sleep that night, does not dream. Names come to him then- Prince Endymion of Elysium, Lady Morrigan of Castle Magellan on Venus. Queen Beryl of the Dark Kingdom. Kunzite. Tokyo.

_Tokyo._

He bids his parents farewell that morning, and they are not as surprised as he would have expected. His mother holds him tight, embracing him as though he were still a child small enough to bury his face in her stomach, then pulls back and smiles.

"When will you come back to tell me that you have found a nice girl?"

"When she forgives me, _Ommi_." He replies, and then leaves for Casablanca again.

Perhaps the fates are smiling upon him now. The taxi driver has his radio station turned onto some top 40's countdown, and the announcer is just calling out a name as he disembarks.

"_Tokyo idol Minako Aino, once upon a time known to the world as the teenage star who played Sailor V, brings us her third single- Your Hardest Goodbye. Taking the top spot for the first time this week..._"

He arrives at the airport and buys a one-way ticket.

XI.

"_Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. The local time is now four thirty-two, and we will be arriving in Tokyo shortly. Please fasten your seatbelts and return your seats and tray tables to their regular upright positions. Flight attendants, prepare for descent._"

Tokyo is a busy city with a crowded airport, and Kareem hasn't the faintest idea where to go, or how to find her. He finally has a name to go with the face, a memory that is not just flashes of ghostly images, but he is not the sort to go off in pursuit of celebrities.

But he will figure it out. This is where his life has been headed all along, and he squares his shoulder, picks up his carry-on bag. Everyone disembarks from the plane and he walks out with all the other people as the familiar sounds of airports around the world surround him- pleasant-voiced announcers on the PA, multilingual chatter, the growling slide of luggage wheels on buffed floors. He has his eyes cast skyward, reading the signs posted up high in order to find out where to go through customs and baggage claim, and doesn't see or hear her until she's close.

The cheerful clack of high-heeled sandals on uncarpeted floor. The smell of exotic flowers in her hair. The girl- young woman, really- wears a bright yellow sundress the colour of ripe lemons and a red bow in her sunny hair. And really, it isn't complicated at all. He has known her in his dreams and memories all his life. Time and death and betrayal had separated them before, but the love had always been waiting.

He drops his bag, unmindful of the crowd or the flashbulbs of enterprising paparazzi, and catches her in his arms. "I've found you," he murmurs, and meets her kiss halfway.

It is as though all the jumbled puzzle pieces of his life-this one and the last one and perhaps any number of others before that- are finally in place. Her lips are sweet and warm under his, her hair soft and golden like the sunlight as he twines it through his fingers. When they finally pull apart, her eyes shine with unshed tears.

"I wasn't sure that you would ever come."

"I've been headed here all my life," he replies, his forehead pressed against hers, his hands cupping her face. She's even more beautiful than he dreamed, up close and soft and strong in his arms. "Forgive me."

She smiles radiantly and touches his face, adjusts his glasses minutely. "I have, long ago."

And maybe it is as easy as that.

XII.

She lives in a small but comfortable apartment decorated with brightly coloured rugs and knicknacks, with chiffony yellow curtains that make the rooms seem constantly awash with sunshine, but the only thing he notices at first is that it's on the third floor, after carrying her up three flights of stairs. They stop every few steps to kiss, and really, he doesn't do this sort of thing.

But this isn't a fling, and when he carries her across the threshold, it feels like coming home. Her fingers are already busy with the buttons of his shirt and they barely manage to undress between kisses. The first time is fast and frenzied, on the living room rug, but the second time is slower and sweeter and they make it to her bed, and afterwards, she traces her fingers over the scars on his chest as she rests her head on his shoulder.

"They're from the sword- when your princess stabbed my prince," he tells her. "Our stones blocked the blade from his heart, and splintered. Maybe that is what freed us in the end."

She nods and presses her lips to the faint white line over his chest, and he strokes his fingers through the length of her hair. Both of them are slightly sweaty, and goosebumps arise on her skin in the cooling air. He pulls the blankets over her and smiles faintly.

"I'll call the others, maybe tomorrow," she murmurs drowsily. Under the blankets, her fingers link with his. "Mamoru will be so glad that you're here. Pluto let us know that you were reborn, and he has missed his friends, I think."

He is slightly nervous at the prospect, but that, too, is a contemplation for later. For now, forever, there is her. He has a lot of lost time to make up for.


	2. Book Two: Jadeite

A/N: Thanks for all the kind reviews, folks! This is Jadeite's tale, and probably reads like a bad kung fu novel. Alas, these things happen. Hopefully you enjoy it anyway? I also took a few liberties with manga canon... but again, these things happen.

Disclaimer: As always.

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_I keep dreaming of you._

I.

The temple in the Wudang Mountains is enshrouded by mist, a small and picturesque building with a grove of poplars in the front and a row of willows in the back. A garden of herbs flourishes in front, throwing scents of angelica and cinnamon into the cool air. A brook runs in the back, alongside the graceful willows, and aside from the sounds of songbirds and running water, the land surrounding the temple is a quiet place.

The baby is found at sunset, fourteen days after the Ghost festival. His cries break the silence and attract the attention of Taoist Master Yang and his wife Lady Liu as they make their sojourn to the brook to set paper boats with candles afloat to guide the spirits of the dead back to the underworld. He is less than a month old, fretful and hungry, swaddled in a blanket and left in a wicker basket. When Lady Liu picks him up, he quiets, the pale golden fuzz covering his head shimmering in the dying sunlight.

Gentle and compassionate as the willow that is her name, Lady Liu takes him home after the rituals and prayers have been observed, and Master Yang, strong and wise as the poplars, searches the mountains all night for a sign of the boy's mother. He finds none.

The boy might be a gift from the ghosts, but they take him in. A year later, after they leave out a feast for the ghosts and burn incense at the altar, Lady Liu picks up the baby, whose eyes are the blue of aconite flowers and whose hair falls around his little head in golden curls, and sets him down on a mat surrounded by various items. The baby crawls over past a copy of the Tao Te Ching and a fresh, dewy lotus blossom, and wraps his chubby fingers around the hilt of one of Master Yang's ceremonial blades, carved of the finest jadeite, snowy-white, streaked through with thin lines of red.

"He will be a warrior," Master Yang murmurs even as he gently pries the heirloom out of the baby's hands. "A fearless fighter of extraordinary skill." He smiles faintly with pride. "I will teach him the ways of fists and swords when he is older, and the patience and honour to use them well."

"I hope that he will not have to use them often," Lady Liu whispers as she picks the boy back up in her arms. He gurgles and smiles and toys with her long black hair.

They name him Bai-Yu Jian- White Jade sword, and call him Jian-Er.

II.

"Keep your back straight and your breathing slow and even. Your mind and heart must be completely calm, your muscles in a deep state of relaxation. The soft and pliable will always eventually defeat the hard and strong." Master Yang's voice is soothing as he sits at one end of a yin-yang painted on the floor. At the opposite end, gamely motionless but not so tranquil, six-year-old Jian-Er tries to mimic the posture.

"When will you teach me how to use the sword and the sabre?" Jian-Er asks, not for the first time. In the weaponry room of the temple, a rack of weaponry lies against the far wall. More than once, the boy has watched in utter fascination as his surrogate parents sparred in the expansive floor of the room- Lady Liu wielding her namesake willow-leaf sabre, Master Yang armed with a tasseled sword. On occasion they would use other, more exotic weapons- deer-horn knives, chain-whips, spears and quarterstaves, but regardless of the weapon, they would spar with grace and speed and remarkable skill.

But for now he must sit in the meditation room, focus on the yin-yang and the eight trigrams and relax his mind. Because his surrogate father has his eyes closed and does not answer his question, Jian-Er pouts at the injustice of it before closing his own eyes. He wants to be a hero, like Lord General Guan-Yu, patron deity of warriors and chieftains of the battlefield, invincible as he defeats his enemies and protects the downtrodden.

But there are many steps to take before he can become a great warrior, and the meditation is key to strengthening his _qi_ and giving his mind the focus it needs to dispel the attacks of opponents. So he sits, in a pose learned from watching, and tries to ignore the itch between his shoulder blades as he counts his breaths.

Vividly behind his eyelids he sees a vision: the visage of a girl he does not know, perhaps a few years younger than him, looking small and sad and lost as she stands next to a big suitcase on the wooden steps of a temple not quite like his. She gets smaller and smaller, her face blurring with distance, as he-or-probably-someone-else walks away.

The caw of a crow echoes in his ears. He almost feels a wind picking up, though he is indoors, and in his mind he sees the girl's long black hair flutter in the breeze.

"I will save you someday," he makes a silent promise, and now sits still in earnest. The trigram at his feet is the one which represents fire.

III.

Jian-Er learns fast, and within a year, has mastered all of the basic stances of Wudang hand-to-hand. By the age of eight he is adept at the four major weapons of spear, sword, sabre and quarterstaff. By nine, he is skilled enough at _Qing Gong_ to take to the roof to avoid Lady Liu's wrath when he accidentally breaks one of her prized agate vases. He is assigned the task of sweeping the steps of the temple and the walks for a month as punishment, and every morning, he is so quiet and solemn as he clears away the autumn leaves that Master Yang becomes concerned.

"You always finish this task too full of _Yin_ melancholy to concentrate on your meditation," the Taoist master states one frosty morning. Overhead, the geese are flying south, and underfoot, both willow and poplar leaves litter the ground. Jian-Er scuffs the toe of his shoe against a slightly loose cobblestone and sighs as he looks up into the face of the man who has been a father to him.

"There is someone else who sweeps the paths, but not here, and she cries when she does it," he says quietly. "I see her tears, hidden by her loose hair, and it makes me sad."

"A ghost, perhaps?" Master Yang raises an eyebrow. "The stories of old are just stories, Jian-Er."

The boy shakes his head, hair the same colour as the fallen leaves blowing back in the wind. "It's a dream. She's waiting for me."

"You're still young," Lady Liu says placatingly, making a mental note to give the boy an infusion of wolfberry and gingko before he went to bed that night. "You still have much to learn before you can find her."

Jian-Er raises his head and meets her eyes, fearless blue to forthright brown. "I will learn all I can, _Shimu_, but I need to find her."

He is excused from sweeping the steps, and sleeps quietly that night. But he still talks of the girl who is waiting, a faraway muse in an unknown land, and though he flourishes in his training and learns all the forms and weapons that Master Yang can teach him by the time he is fifteen, he's restless, unable to find the tranquility to abide within the mountains.

On the sixteenth Ghost Festival since his arrival at Wudang, he prays with the others and sets a paper boat holding a candle down within the creek, but rather than coming home, follows its path.

Many years would pass before Master Yang and Lady Liu would see him again.

IV.

There is a living that has to be made in the busier, grittier parts of the world than mountain temples, and Jian- no more affectionate diminutive attached- finds this out quickly. Sleeping under the stars is not safe in the cities, and after a few skirmishes with a few hoodlums after an attempt to steal the heirloom jade sword that has been bequeathed to him five years back, finds himself brought forward to an abandoned warehouse at gunpoint.

The man sitting behind a desk speaks with the smoothness of a professional and wears a sharply tailored suit, but his aura is very murky. But he offers Jian a delectable meal at a pricey restaurant and a plush hotel room. The next evening, he says, there is to be a fight, hand-to-hand, for a lot of money. And the victor would take twenty percent of the spoils.

It is a better deal than getting into fisticuffs with foolish youngsters who engage in petty crime for cheap thrills, and Jian agrees. The next evening finds him in the middle of a ring facing a hulking brute with arms wider than his temple's pillars, surrounded by shady businessmen and cigarette smoke and bottles of liquor. His opponent leers, revealing broken teeth, and barely bows before throwing a punch with a fist the size of a cinderblock.

"_The soft and pliable will always defeat the hard and strong,"_ Master Yang's lessons echo in his head, and he slowly moves in a circle, arms sweeping up over his head. A gentle block, a faint shrug, and the brute lands hard on his face.

The fight is over in less than three minutes. Jian isn't even winded, and ignores the roar of the crowds, the shuffle of stacks of money. There is no aloofly beautiful dark-haired girl among all the faces of the crowd, or in the fancy restaurant, or the hotel.

That night, when he sleeps, he dreams of fire burning against the skies.

V.

The next battle is against a smaller but more skillful opponent. They're armed this time- Jian wields a plain sword to his opponent's more showy selection of a pair of tonfas, and Jian enters the ring with the belief that the fight is to be a friendly one.

He takes it easy on the other fellow, whose vaults through the air and flourishing movements disguise but don't completely hide his nerves, and then has to throw himself to the ground to dodge a brutal blow to the skull. The crowd roars- the sound bloodthirsty and feral- and the inner tranquility of a true warrior is buried underneath indignation. He spins, kicking one tonfa out of his opponent's hand as the tip of his sword flings the other across the room, and has the man on his back, blade to throat, a second later.

The winnings increase, and he acquires more money and glory than his wildest dreams. He fights with skill and intensity, but his heart is not in it. There is nothing heroic or even honourable about sparring for the entertainment of villains.

One day, after a brutal battle in which he takes on and defeats three armed opponents wielding nothing but his fists and feet, a kittenishly charming young lady- the daughter of a top backer- accosts him with fluttering eyelashes and dazzled smiles.

He plays along, but only for a few minutes. It's all wrong, and she's not the one.

_She_ would never bat her eyelashes to get his attention. _She_ wouldn't have to.

But the tales of the young, golden-haired warrior spread far and wide, and attracts the attention of others outside of the shadowy world of underground prizefighting. Jian accepts an offer of a position as a powerful politician's bodyguard, and moves to Japan.

VI.

Hino Takashi is wealthy, shrewd, commanding and cold as ice, surrounded by quietly dignified servants and priceless antiques in a house that sits empty of true emotion. The room he offers Jian is impeccably clean and elegantly decorated, and almost twice the size of the room he'd had in the temple in the mountains. Nonetheless, it is chilly in there when he sleeps at night on a mat on the floor, as though the majority of the house has not had human habitation in ages.

Senator Hino curtly introduces him to his various servants and staff members, but makes no mention of family. He is in his forties, in the prime of his life, and it is only after several days that Jian learns from one of the chambermaids that the man is a widower with a daughter that lives elsewhere. Something about it bothers him, and it is only Hino's frigid lack of emotion that prevent him from asking his employer why his family is gone.

Being in the employ of a Japanese politician is a job that requires more patience and cunning than winning fights in an arena. Jian makes an enemy his first day at the senator's office.

The senator's secretary is a young man with an intellectually handsome face that thinly glosses over his inherent superciliousness. Hino introduces the fellow as Kaidou, and though Jian knows nothing about him, they size each other up like strange cats. Kaidou gives him the barest and coolest of bows, which he does not return, and then sneers.

"Jee-ann, is that your name?" the political secretary drawls, perfectly polished and poised in his western-style suit and neatly knotted navy blue tie. "You grew up in the remote mountains in China? How quaint. I suppose I cannot expect you to know that _here_, in Japan, you're supposed to bow when you meet someone."

Two pairs of blue eyes meet- one stony, one mocking. Jian makes a shuffling motion with his hands, and the other man is on the ground, prostrate, unhurt but utterly humiliated. Jian gets some satisfaction that Kaidou's tie is askew and his perfectly groomed hair is falling in dishevelled tufts now, and takes a step back.

"All right. You have bowed, and we have met. I'll thank you to leave me alone from now on."

Later that evening he apologizes to the senator for his ill manners, though the latter waves it off as he waves off anything that does not have to do with his work, and then Jian retires to his room. In the cold, expansive space, he sits and wonders why- when he does not feel any personal attachment to his boss- does he consider Kaidou a rival.

Kaidou is simply another of Hino's large crowd of servants and assistants and colleagues- the people who exist to do his bidding and do not matter otherwise. It is not as though he has anything that Jian could possibly want.

VII.

April 17th.

"It is my daughter's birthday."

The senator will not be attending, and Jian is given instructions and the necessary background information. Hino's daughter, who resides in a temple with her grandfather, will be fourteen. On the last several birthdays, it has been Kaidou who would bring her a white dress from her father, which she would wear to an exclusive restaurant for dinner. After the dinner, year after year, she would be presented with a bouquet of Casablanca lilies before they parted ways. But Kaidou is getting married, and it is now Jian's duty to meet with the younger Hino.

"Why don't you attend the dinner yourself?" Jian asks before he can stop himself. And for the first time ever, a flicker of emotion- grief so strong it must come directly from the heart- crosses the Senator's usually-impassive face.

"Rei is nothing like me," Hino murmurs, shaking his head, and all of sudden Jian sees him for what he is- an old man with too many regrets and losses that he will never be able to atone for, and feels a wave of deep pity. Hino clasps his hands together, clears his throat. "She's just like her mother."

The moment passes, and then the senator is impassive again, stone-faced and businesslike. "You will meet her at seven. She will be expecting you. You will return at half-past nine."

At a quarter to seven Jian walks out of the parking lot and approaches the intersection. The restaurant, with its gleaming glass windows and bright lights, is just across the street, and at the street corner, clad in spotless white, is a girl with long, dark hair.

Jian's eyes widen behind the sunglasses he wears, and his senses tingle with anticipation. She is facing the restaurant's door, her back to him, but he _knows_ that it is the girl who haunts his dreams, the girl that is his destiny to protect. The bouquet of Casablanca lilies nearly falls from his fingers as he steps off the curb.

A black car approaches the intersection and stops at the light, and suddenly his nerves jangle with imminent danger. Even before he sees the redheaded woman behind the wheel or the gun she holds in her hands, he is vaulting over the other pedestrians, a hot-blooded warrior in a navy blue suit, deaf and blind to the shrieks and exclamations and gawking from all the people. He has only one thought- _her_.

He lands on his feet right in front of her, and has a split second to see her face- startled, beautiful, achingly familiar- before the window of the black car starts rolling down and he pushes her out of the way, shielding her with his own body. Shots ring out and he reels from the pain, and the Casablancas fall out of his hands, an arc of red-splattered white. A nightmarish image- a tasseled Chinese sword stabbing through her heart as the world smokes and burns around them- flashes before his eyes, and he whispers "Forgive me" right before everything goes black.

He cannot be sure that she heard him, but the last thing he feels are her hands reaching for him.

When the dust clears and the police arrive, neither him nor the car are anywhere to be found. The senator's daughter is left in front of the restaurant with a trampled bouquet of flowers at her feet and red blood splattered on her snow-white dress.

VIII.

White.

White lights, white walls, white sheets. An antiseptic-scented snowfall that surrounds him, and it is nothing like a city street. Jian sees a sleek fall of raven hair close by and struggles to sit up for a moment, then stops.

"Don't overexert yourself." The woman is beautiful, with striking features and eyes the colour of rosewood on an olive-skinned face. "You were badly injured, and your body is still recovering."

Jian's sigh escapes silently between his lips as his eyes focus on her face. "You're not her," he blurts out. "I'm sorry, I... what happened? Who are you?"

"Meiou Setsuna," she introduces herself and takes a seat by his bed. "You are in Kyoto. It is August 17th, 2010. Midnight."

It is four months and four years exactly from the last day he remembers, and the number four is unlucky. He struggles into a sitting position, terrified but game, and stares at the woman. "How did I get here? Where is she?" Through a window close to the bed he can see outside, and there are fires glowing amidst the darkness. "What is happening?"

"It is _Obon_- the Ghost Festival, and the fires are to guide lost spirits back home," Meiou-san tells him. "You have been injured, and asleep for a long time. And _she_ is all right."

It is the twenty-second ghost festival of his life, and he does not remember the last several.

He also does not remember the origin of the faint, faded burn scars laddering up and down his forearms. With Meiou-san watching over him in silence, he slides back into a fitful sleep, and dreams of a girl in red and white, her dark hair softer than a lover's caress underneath his fingers.

IX.

Old habits die hard. Jian tolerates the doctors poking and prodding at him, but recovers his strength through meditation and the focus of his internal energy more than the bouts of physical therapy or the parade of pills. Meiou-san visits him once in a while, bringing him his jade sword and personal effects and some-but-not-all information. He can almost feel the power radiating off of her, but she offers no explanation for her identity or the reason that she has taken to helping him out. She does, however, listen in silent sympathy and a strange sort of understanding when he talks about his dreams and a feeling of regret that plagues him, and does not scoff when he rambles in his sleep about dark-haired princesses and broken vows.

One day Meiou-san visits and tells him that if he wishes, he can return to Senator Hino's employ at any time, with a hefty bonus for saving the politician's daughter, and he is tempted. At long last, he would meet her, and maybe she would smile like she so rarely does in his dreams. But the sense of guilt can't be shaken, and he agonizes all week over the decision.

She visits him again the next week. It is winter now, and he has recovered from all his wounds, though the burn scars remain like faint, shiny fingerprints on his arms. He is standing by the window when she walks in, watching the snow fall to cover all the soot and grime of the world in a blanket of white.

"I have to go back to the temple on the mountains. I have to regain my balance, find myself again. My _Shifu_ and _Shimu_ deserve an apology and an explanation for my unfilial behaviour."

She smiles, nods. "I know." She reaches into a purse and hands him an envelope. "Here."

"What is this?"

"Your passport- I took the liberty to get it renewed for you, a boarding pass for a flight to Shanghai, and a train ticket to Shiyan Prefecture, from where you'll be able to reach the mountains." At his expression of surprise, her smile widens just a little. "You do yourself and your _Shifu_'s teachings justice, Bai-Yu Jian. I knew that you would." She sets the envelope down and walks towards the door, pauses. "You will be back right in time for the Lunar New Year. They will be happy to see you." She bows, as is the Japanese custom, and without hesitation, Jian returns the gesture of respect. "Have a safe trip."

X.

The temple is remote, picturesque and timeless, and when Jian climbs up the mountain, he recognizes the same tall poplars in the front, the same graceful willows in the back. The brook is frozen over and the herb garden covered in snow, but it is still the home he remembers from all those years ago. There is a pair of red banners hanging on either side of the main doors for the Lunar New Year, written in a pretty calligraphy that he does not recognize, reading "As faithful as the lilies that bloom in spring, so the hundreds of souls will join for peace". For the first time ever, Jian hesitates at the door, unsure of his welcome, but before he can decide whether or not to knock, it is thrown open. He finds himself gazing down at a small, apple-cheeked girl wearing festive red ribbons in her hair, who has Master Yang's eyes and Lady Liu's smile. "Hello."

"Shu-Li, if you wish to play outside, you must put on something warmer." Her voice is still the same, soft and even-timbred, and he hears her footsteps approaching. Lady Liu is as elegant and gentle as he remembers, though there are a few strands of grey in her hair now, and when she sees him, her eyes fill with tears.

He bows, then wipes his own eyes before taking the hand that she holds out to him. Formality and ceremony fall to the wayside and he takes the woman who had raised him and loved him into his arms, letting his own tears fall into her hair. "_Niang_," he whispers, addressing her for the first time not as his teacher but as his mother, "I have returned."

"You must be my big brother Jian-Er that mother and father have told me about," the little girl finally breaks the silence, with a smile that draws an answering one from Jian's face. "Father says that you are a great warrior. I am Shu-Li and I will be seven years old this year."

Jian lets go of Lady Liu and stoops down to be eye-level with the little girl, whose name means 'beauty of writing'. She would have been born a few months after he'd left. "I'm so pleased to meet you, little sister. Happy New Year."

"I wrote the couplet hanging on the door," Shu-Li tells him with ingenuous pride. "Mother teaches me calligraphy. I had a feeling that this new year would be a special one."

"She picked an heirloom ivory ink brush for the ceremony on her first birthday, like you picked the jade sword." Master Yang's voice is still deep and strong, tranquil without being listless, stern without being cold, but his eyes give him away as he surveys Jian. A faint smile crosses his face. "Your aura is not so impulsive and restless as it was when you were a child. Your mind is clearer. Have you found your peace?"

"I'm still seeking it," Jian answers honestly, clasping the hand Master Yang holds out to him in both of his own. "But I am much closer than before."

XI.

Winter ends, and spring begins. Jian helps Master Yang chop wood and Lady Liu tend her garden, and plays with little Shu-Li. He visits the villages down in the valleys and helps maintain law and order. It is a far more humble life than that which he had before- retrieving purses stolen by pickpockets and stopping local drunkards from harassing the tavern maids is hardly exciting work, but he feels more at peace now than the days of battling others for entertainment or learning about the intrigues of high politics. He meditates daily and does not find it difficult to sit still and clear his mind any more.

He roams the mountains and forests of his youth with little Shu-Li, and sees everything in a different light, though the eyes of a child whose imagination beautifies everything around her. She begs him to teach her how to fight, and he encourages her to focus on her poetry and calligraphy, and brings her sweets from the markets of the villages.

One day she shows him a spot, a hollow that he has never noticed before, where white lilies grow. "I wrote my New Year's couplet about lilies, because they represent peace and unity. But this is the only place they grow here. Mother says that she has walked past this spot many times without seeing anything, but they started blooming in April five years ago."

He remembers another bouquet of lilies on April, five years ago, and closes his eyes briefly. She would be a young woman now, and in his mind's eye he can still see her face. Memories swarm in his mind- the clang of weapons, a group of men in armour, a blue-eyed prince, a dark-haired princess. The yearning that comes is so strong that his heart aches with it, and he forces himself to focus on the little girl who holds his hand so trustingly. Shu-Li looks up at him with eyes full of an understanding that belies her young age.

"You will find your own lily, your own peace and unity. I will see you again."

He smiles and hugs her close, and tugs on one of her pigtails. "Try not to give your parents as much trouble as I did, little one."

This time when he leaves, it is with the blessing of his surrogate parents. Master Yang walks with him to the base of the mountain, and they pause at the fork in the road. The older man claps him on the shoulder and smiles.

"You'll find her, Jian-Er. She'll be waiting."

"You believed me all this time? Even when it was just the rambling fancies of a child?"

"I did not raise you to be a liar," Master Yang says simply. "You've grown up to become an honourable man, Jian-Er. I am proud to have you for a son."

XII.

He stops at several holy spots during the course of his journey, paying his respects at Mt. Emei and Shaolin Temple and Peng-Lai and Mt. Fuji before arriving in Tokyo. He arrives at Hikawa Jinja at sunset, and makes his way down the quiet paths- past falling cherry blossoms and cawing crows- to the Fire Room. Kneeling down at the altar, he takes out the silk-covered box that contains a priceless jade sword, slides open the tiny ivory pins that hold it shut, and lifts the white blade out of its satin nest. Carefully, he sets it down on the altar with both hands, bows his head, lights a stick of incense.

"I have lived so long for battle and war. I have broken a promise to you in the past, and lost you due to my own weakness. But I have paid- my blood for yours, my life for yours- and in the event of necessity would pay it again. Now, because you don't need a protector so much as a believer, because you need to be loved rather than saved, I will live for peace, and for honour, and for faith. I pray for a chance, but more, I pray for your happiness."

He shuts his eyes and lets his mind clear, let the tranquility of the place and the scent of the incense and the warmth of the fire surround him. He is so absorbed in his meditation that he does not hear the running footsteps, or the door sliding open, does not notice that he has an audience as he repeats his words to himself. But he opens his eyes when he hears a gasp, and, heart hammering, turns his head.

There she is, in her shrine robes of white and red, her raven hair loose and billowing behind her as she stares at him. She is even more beautiful than his dreams and memories, silhouetted by the glowing sunset, and so many emotions flit across her eyes that he can barely keep up.

Wordlessly, he picks up the jade sword, its blade cold and sharp, and holds it out to her. "This is yours now. Do what you will."

His words spur her into action, and she steps forward, takes the blade. He does not move, does not drop his gaze, and she shakes her head as she places it back in its box.

"You... I cannot take this. I _will_ not do what you think I would." Her voice softens, and there is a barely perceptible tremor in it. "Bai-Yu Jian. I know who you are. This sword is you- your namesake, your legacy."

"It is who I was, perhaps," he smiles faintly. "I've shed the blood of many in my time, too many. I have come in search of peace now, to atone for the past. You've killed me- but worse, you've hated me- for what I have done. I don't now if I will ever truly find redemption for that."

She does not move, still staring at him in shock, and he takes a deep breath, lets it out as he stands. The pain in his heart will come later, like a dart coated with slow-acting poison hitting a pressure point. For now he smiles down into her lovely face and walks towards the door. "I have knelt at your fire, prayed for your happiness. I have truly met you at last, and you're so much more than even all my dreams and memories. I will always have this moment. It will be enough. Thank you."

He puts one foot in front of the other, but doesn't go more than three steps when her voice stops him. It is soft, but it definitely has a hitch now.

"You're wrong."

He glances back, and stares into her brilliant amethyst eyes. She takes a step forward, away from the sword still on the floor, clasps her slender hands as though in prayer. "The man that I remember, who loved me and believed in me, would never thank me like a visitor and _leave_."

He crosses the remaining distance between them and grasps her slim shoulders. They're shaking slightly, but she does not lower her eyes. And everything begins to fit together like the halves of a yin-yang as he pulls her close. She has unshed tears in her eyes, but the smile that crosses her face is radiant.

"Leave? I've just arrived. I'll never leave you again." It is the most important promise he will ever make. She reaches up and touches his face, stands on tiptoe, and guides his lips down to hers.

Outside, bearing witness to this reunion, a benevolent full moon rises in the sky, bathing the world in pure white light.


	3. Book Three: Zoisite

A/N: Here is the third installment of the Tempus Fugit stories! Thank you to everyone who has been reviewing, and I am glad that you guys are enjoying this series thus far. To answer a question that was brought up, the point of this series is sort of a glimpse at the shitennou's lives before they were captured by Beryl- and how they put themselves in the position to get captured by Beryl- and then the years that they do not remember, before they "wake up", are the years that they are in Beryl's service/dead after being in Beryl's service. By the time they wake up, with Pluto to guide them, it's a new world heading in the direction of Crystal Tokyo, and they then have to work towards redeeming themselves. Hence the series title of 'Time Disappears'. Hope that made sense! Also, I decided to put all of the shitennou in their respective 'kingdoms' for their formative years. Therefore, Kunzite grew up in Morocco/Middle East, Jadeite in China/Far East, and Zoisite, in this chapter, in Ireland/Europe.

Disclaimer: As usual.

* * *

_Love is the person you think about during the sad songs._

I.

The times might be tempestuous, and the city of Belfast fraught with violence, but Delaney's Pub is always cozy and welcoming. Those who come in for a pint of Guinness or a bite to eat often return, warmed by the turf fire in the hearth and the hospitality of Brian Delaney. On busy Saturdays, there would be music, played by Brian's wife Maggie and their daughter Una, who at the age of eight is already a fine hand at the piano and has a sweet, pure voice.

It is on a stormy day in June that Maggie's time comes, and the rains are merciless, the thunder loud and menacing. Brian drives frantically, with his wife and daughter in the backseat of the car, trying to navigate the nigh-impassable roads so that they might reach the hospital in time, but the labour is too quick, the rain-slicked roads too difficult. At long last, the desperate father parks the vehicle at the side of the road in front of a church as his wife struggles to bring their son into the world. Holding her mother's hand, little Una sings a hymn and prays.

It is over in less than an hour, and somewhat miraculously, just as the newborn babe utters his first cry, the rain stops abruptly, and where there was the background noise of rain and thunder, only music remains. There is a rainbow in the sky, bright and beautiful as any ever seen, and though Brian drives his family the rest of the way to the hospital, he knows instinctively that his wife and newborn son will be fine. The boy is a miracle, hale and hearty and alert, and they name him after the saint whose Feast Day is the same day as his birthday. And so Zephan Delaney is born amidst tempestuous chaos, but ushers in music and peace as he takes his first breath.

II.

Young Zephan is a precocious child, quick to smile or frown with his moods, sharp-witted and clever and full of odd fancies that glow like lost memories in his wistful green eyes. Perhaps due to the fierceness of the storm that heralded his birth, he feels both an attraction and a fear of water, and spends hours along the shore searching for selkies without venturing even a toe into the sea. He idolizes his older sister, and indeed, only Una knows his innermost thoughts and secrets.

Una doesn't judge or ask questions when he is really too old to believe in the folk tales of sad-eyed girls who emerge from the water, or scoff at him when he claims to hear harp song that sounds like tears turned into notes whenever he is sad. She teaches him piano, two pairs of small hands fluttering over the simple black and white of the keys, and lets him fiddle around on the computer she uses for her college courses. He shows a startling aptitude for that, dealing with viruses and network problems and frozen word processing programs with instinctive skills that come without training, and she smiles and jokes that maybe someday he would become the next Bill Gates. He shrugs; ambition is not one of his strong suits, and Bill Gates probably doesn't have visions of blue-eyed sea nymphs and echoes of melancholy harp cadences to distract him.

III.

But Belfast is not always forgiving of its dreamers, and even the cozy, sheltering warmth of the pub and his family cannot protect him for always. He is twelve years old when it happens, on a day without any rain.

The bomb is meant to be planted in the parked car of the constable who may or may not be inside Delaney's pub, stopping in for a pint or a bite to eat. The bomber, disguised as a tourist with his deadly cargo in a backpack, steps into the pub to check for his quarry. It is a quiet afternoon; Brian smiles warmly and unsuspectingly at the newcomer as he comes in, and the constable is indeed at the bar, off-duty, enjoying a bowl of soup and thanking the matronly blonde woman who is serving him.

The bomber, all of twenty-three, sees a pretty young woman with coppery curls of hair singing and playing the scarred old piano in the corner, and for a moment, yearns for something more than a life of bitter war and vengeful nationalism. He pauses at the piano just as she reaches the second verse of "The Water Is Wide", and the explosive device he'd almost forgotten about detonates several minutes too early.

She doesn't even have time to scream. In the space of an instant, the whole front end of the pub is blown into smithereens. The bomber dies instantly, and the constable that is his target loses both his legs. Brian Delaney survives, fished out of the rubble blinded and paralyzed, a broken shell of his former self.

There is barely enough left of his wife and daughter to identify the remains.

That night, after Zephan returns from school to find his home and family gone, he is taken in by one of the neighbours, and sent to sleep in a strange bed. The haunting harp song that he hears in his mind whenever he is sad is practically a concerto now as he sobs through the darkest hours of the night. Una is dead; no one will know about the music and shadows that haunt him now, but in the strangest way, though every note sounds like heartbreak, it is nonetheless a solace in the long, dark night.

IV.

It is perhaps a quirk of fate that though Una's piano is destroyed like so much split kindling, the sheet music that she had kept inside the bench is unscathed. Zephan does not have another piano to play any more, but the neighbour who takes him and his badly-injured father in takes pity on the boy and loans him a violin.

Zephan picks up the technique of the violin with the same sort of ease and flare as the piano, but it is a more lonely instrument, with a range like a soloist rather than a group. It can still play the melodies of all the songs he knows, but try though he might, he cannot duplicate the elusive, haunting threnody of harp song that echoes in his mind. He thinks vaguely that if he can only master it, outwit the echoes and dreams that make no sense, he will be free from the vague sense of fear that it brings.

V.

He spends more time on his music than on his studies, and scores poorly on his Geography GCSE. But because Una had scored within the top tier for all of hers when she was the same age, he spends a tense evening in a computer lab with a mission in mind, wearing a hat pulled low over his head, typing frenetically at his console.

It is full dark when he finishes, and he sneaks through the window of the home-that-is-not-home as the clock strikes midnight, not unlike any other fifteen-year-old out late for no good reason. But he has neither spent his time dallying with a girl nor getting into any sort of destructive vandalism.

Zephan has his first successful hacking experience before he reaches the age of majority, and when he finishes his school term, all the records indicate flawless marks on his exams, and his bank account is padded with trickles of money from several corporations so large and wealthy that they might not notice the breach. It is a thrill, finding the power and the way to break into the system, but the sleepless nights that follow aren't all due to euphoria.

The dream-girl who rises out of the water sits on the beach, blue-black hair blowing in the wind, and shakes her head in disapproval at his actions. And the melody of her harp song becomes stormy as a wind-tossed sea. It is increasingly hard to bear the heaviness of her gaze and the sheen of unshed tears in her sea-blue eyes, and Zephan, never a brawny lad to begin with, becomes porcelain-pale and thin.

At seventeen, he breaks into government computer systems and forges identification that shows himself to be twenty-two and a college graduate, and runs away from Belfast.

He leaves the city behind, but can't escape the ghosts that haunt him.

VI.

London is foggy and impersonal, and he feels a wave of self-consciousness every time he speaks, his lilting Irish brogue making him stick out like a sore thumb amidst the crisp tones of the natives. He takes temporary residence in a cheap rat-trap of a hostel on the East side and goes in search of work.

He gets hired to wash dishes at a greasy spoon diner for barely enough money to keep a roof over his head, but not for long. At the end of the week, as he is walking out the door, he almost bumps into a tall, sophisticated-looking man in an expensive suit.

"Sure and I do beg your pardon," Zephan sidesteps out of the gentleman's way, but the man holds up a business card out to him. Confused, he takes it, and engraved on the thin cardboard is the name E. Sharp, then the title "Head of Information Technology, D-Point International". Zephan pauses with more than a little trepidation even as the man strikes a match against the pitted brick and lights a cigarette. He had siphoned money from D-Point International's business accounts in order to pay for the plane ticket that had brought him to London.

"We have been watching you for a while, Mr. Delaney," Sharp sucks in smoke, the tip of the cigarette glowing demon-red in the darkness, and as discordant notes echo in his head, Zephan contemplates pushing past the man and running for his life. Perhaps Sharp anticipates it, because he flicks off ashes, exhales a ghostly-white plume, and smiles. "The CEO has sent me to offer you a choice."

In the farthest reaches of Zephan's mind, the blue-eyed girl from the water has a look of abject terror on her face and he clenches his fists, futilely trying to protect her even though she merely exists in his mind. But Sharp does not notice as he continues.

"You have misappropriated enough money from our accounts that it would be a small matter to press charges and have you arrested for fraud and a number of other nasty charges, and as you are past the age of majority- and have an easily-explained motive of greed and desire for funds to improve your living situation- you could be put away for a long time. It is a small matter for our barristers, rest assured. And we could crush you." As though to illustrate his point, Sharp carelessly drops the butt of his cigarette down on the pavement and viciously grinds it into the asphalt with the toe of one wing-tipped shoe. Zephan swallows the lump in his throat and takes a small step back.

"Or, you can work for us as a programmer, explore and implement new forms of marketing to attain a larger customer base, and make a great deal of money." The man's smile is the cold, ruthless one of a cutthroat businessman as he holds out both hands. "I suppose some might call it hacking, if they wished to be technical. But you are about to be arrested."

Zephan is cornered, a stranger in a strange land, with nothing but grim and gloomy music in his mind for company or support, and he does not truly have a choice. The next morning, when he is ushered into a cubicle inside the sleek, modernist skyscraper that houses the offices of D-Point International, he finds that there is already a name plate and personalized stationery with his name ready at his work station.

He does not meet the CEO that day, but Sharp gives him a quick orientation, and leaves him to his work.

That night, he dreams of storm-tossed seas and wakes up sweaty and freezing at three in the morning. The room and his mind are silent as a tomb; there is no sound of harp song anywhere.

VII.

The work is challenging, but he is successful, and throws himself into it with a single-minded focus that comes when something else- something vital- is gone from his life. He always has the radio on, tuned to a different station every day, when he works. It is a poor substitute for other music that he has lost, but works as a coping mechanism.

He quickly establishes a reputation as an eccentric genius, a brilliant programmer who can hack into anything and solve any technical puzzles as though they were arithmetic sums. And perhaps it is due to this reputation that he is left alone by his colleagues, and while several might shake their heads at his unwillingness to discuss anything deeper than the most casual of topics or the too-old emerald eyes in the boyishly handsome face, they don't ask questions.

No one knows that he avoids the front-desk receptionist on the first floor because her bob of sleek black hair and intelligent blue eyes remind him of a face that haunts him, or that he works so late every night because only by exhausting himself physically can he wake in the mornings without remembering every detail of increasingly terrible dreams in which his water nymph stares up into his face with tears falling from her blue eyes as an arrow tears through fabric and flesh to lodge in her heart. Always, always right before he wakes with a gasp and tears stinging his eyes, he hears an echo of her music in the air like a final token of love. Always, he wakes up freezing, a good hour or so before dawn.

Sharp visits him at his cubicle about three months into his employment at D-Point and compliments him on his work ethic and technical skills, and tells him that the CEO will be meeting with him later that week. Zephan only knows that the powerful figure behind the multimillion-dollar corporation is a woman, and barely listens to Sharp as he focuses on his work. The program he is working on is difficult, and for some reason uncooperative that day.

After the last employee clocks out for the day, Zephan is still at his station, debugging another glitch. It seems imperative that he outwit the computer as though it is a foe, and despite bug after dead end after error, he's still typing briskly. The nighttime janitor comes and goes, his grunts and shuffles and the white noise of the vacuum cleaner almost drowned out by the strains of Vivaldi playing on Zephan's radio. The clock strikes nine, then ten, then eleven, and he is so close to finishing that he can almost taste it.

He is pale in the ghostly glow of the fluorescent desk lamp and his nose is all but pressed to the monitor as he types in the final line of code with a flourish, but the moment his fingers lift from the keyboard, the radio cuts to static. He thinks he sees a flash of red hair in his peripheral vision, but that might be the product of overwork and an overactive imagination.

Suddenly, the screen flashes and flickers in a frenetic pattern of zeroes and ones, a message in binary that he does not have time to decode. And then the numbers seem to glow, the black screen seems to magnify, and he pitches forward into that dark abyss.

VIII.

The first thing he notices is the snow, visible through the window as it falls rapidly from the skies. He is definitely nowhere even close to the D-Point building, and his skin stings as though it has been covered in thousands of shallow cuts. He groans and tries to move his limbs, but can only succeed in wiggling one finger.

Belatedly, he realizes that he is lying in a hospital bed, and then he sees a woman that he does not recognize watching him from a chair in the corner.

"Good evening," she greets him in a cool, mellifluous voice without any discernible accent. She does not sound Irish or English or even American, and Zephan cannot place her. She is tall, with a timelessly beautiful face and a cloak of sable hair, and wears a jumper the colour of good claret. "Are you in a lot of pain?"

It strikes him as sort of an odd question to ask- as opposed to the more conventional 'How do you feel?', but he shakes his head. It takes a few tries before he can speak, and his voice is merely a whisper.

"Where am I?"

"You're in London, in a hospital. You've lost quite a bit of blood due to your injuries, but you'll be all right by and by." She smiles with faint amusement that is ironic but not malicious. "It is February 2nd, 2010. Candlemas, or _Imbolc_. Whichever you prefer for your faith."

His eyes widen in shock and distress. He is certain that there is a mistake somewhere, somehow. It was a little more than four years ago that he'd stayed until midnight at his workplace tapping away at a computer, and he remembers nothing of what happened afterwards. But before he can say anything, before he can cry out, he hears it, a faint cadence.

Harp song.

It plays again in his head, exhilarating and joyous, no longer a dirge but a celebration, and he blinks in bewilderment even as his thoughts and words are cut off by the phantom music. The woman watches him for a few moments, and then smiles.

"Someone is glad that you are alive."

The image of the girl from the water, when he last saw her, was a crumpled body with an arrow in her chest, and yet for the first time in many, many years, Zephan feels the faint blossoming of hope. Perhaps it is the symbolism of the day- one that portends the return of spring. Perhaps she is alive, after all. Perhaps he is not completely alone.

"The doctors will want to conduct a few tests, check your vitals. There was some nerve damage along with your injuries which will take some time to heal, to restore full sensory and motor function. But you have plenty of time." The woman graces him with another wry smile. "You're young. Not yet twenty-two. You have your whole life ahead of you, and you're very lucky."

All his carefully-doctored pieces of identification would have listed him as twenty-two four years ago, and yet the enigmatic woman knows better, and he still doesn't know who she is.

"What's your name?"

"Una Proserpine," comes the answer, and he almost chokes at the first name she gives him. But she leans forward, and rests a slim hand wearing a garnet ring over his for a moment. "Rest now, Zephan. You'll find your peace. And remember that you're not alone."

She leaves, and he ignores the doctors largely as they enter and check over his state, and in the end, lets the jubilant, soaring notes of the music that has returned to him lull him to a better sleep than he has remembered for a very long time.

IX.

The doctors give him anywhere from two months to a year to recover the rest of the way, and the woman who calls herself Una Proserpine visits him once a week. She seems to know a great deal about his history past the lies he has constructed around himself, but gives no clue to her own identity. Perhaps she works with law enforcement in rehabilitating those who break the law. In any case, she gives him information that his work for D-Point- though the company is now defunct- has made him comfortably well off.

"You were more valuable to them than you may have thought," she informs him when he stares, boggled, at a statement from a savings account in his name that he never even knew about. "They were bought out by Dark, Moon and Associates a few years back, but a hacker of your caliber could find that sort of work again very easily."

The death of his water nymph flashes again before his eyes and he shakes his head. "I... no."

Una Proserpine smiles in what might be approval, and nods before she takes her leave. "I'm sure you will figure out what to do with your life."

When he is released from the hospital, he rents a small flat above a small cafe and buys a laptop computer. During the day, he plays the piano downstairs, training fingers stiff from disuse into reproducing the songs from his youth as a way to honour the mother and sister he'd lost. In the evenings, he takes classes online to acquire the knowledge covered on exams he'd only pretended to take and pass.

Scoring top tier on a Geography GCSE seems like a milestone.

After that, he spends a month holed up in his room, working frenetically at his laptop not unlike the way he used to do in the cubicle at D-Point International. With the reassuring presence of the music and a mission in mind, he carefully writes the program, recalls every hack, every piece of malware, every virus he'd ever created. Like a composer who takes discordant sounds and reconstructs them into a symphony, he writes his program line by painstaking line.

When he is done at last, he has created a top-of-the-line antivirus and anti-spyware software that he knows he could patent and market to make millions. He could indeed, as his sister had once prophesized, become a computer tycoon.

Quietly, he uploads the program onto the internet, and makes it available to the general public for free.

X.

It is high summer when he receives a note from the lady he knows only as Una Proserpine. It invites him to meet with her at the Westminster Millennium Pier, along the Thames. He finds her waiting there close to the clock tower of Big Ben.

"You look a great deal better since the last time I have seen you. Stronger, both physically and mentally," she remarks as they walk along the riverside. For the first time since his youth, being by the water doesn't fill him with a sense of trepidation and fascinated guilt any more. They are eye-level; she is as tall as he is in her high heels, and she is carrying a large case. They pause when they reach the water, and he stares into the surface of the river as the sun starts to go down. She is not here, of course. But he can't resist trying to find her.

"You've come almost full circle," Una Proserpine remarks quietly. "They know that you've made something of yourself, and that while you have made mistakes, you have also worked to rectify them." Zephan knows that she refers to not only the family he has lost, but the still-nameless muse that somehow she knows about. She hands him the case she is carrying, and it is only when he gets a close look at the shape of it that he understands. Slim, long-fingered hands carefully work at the zipper, the clasps. Inside is an old, scarred violin the colour of the Guinness his parents used to serve with welcoming smiles.

"It's not much to look at, but you can make something beautiful with it," she tells him as she steps back. "A good friend of mine is a professional violinist, and she says that it's a good instrument. It's yours."

She has disappeared through the crowds before he can even find the words to thank her, so instead, he stops where he is standing, tightens and rosins the bow, tunes the strings. And when he plays, and everyone pauses to listen and momentarily forget about their troubles, everything gradually starts to fall into place.

The tune is a snippet of what he remembers, from some classical music that his sister would often play. It's called "Mercury, the Winged Messenger".

_Mercury._

A prince with a quartet of guardians. A kingdom with a garden of roses. A sweet, incredibly lovely princess who has powers over water and ice. A redheaded witch with a silky voice and a poisoned soul. A betrayed heart, an untimely death.

His dream-girl is real. He has to find her.

XI.

He has no idea where she might be, but the world is only so big of a place, after all. He moves out of the flat above the cafe and packs his laptop and a few vitals in a backpack, and travels by bus or subway from town to town. He has enough money saved up to travel more comfortably, but she could be anywhere, and planes generally only flew to bigger cities.

More often than not, he plays for his supper, wiling a few hours away every day at street corners and metro stations, giving any number of strangers the sort of respite through music that he'd had in the worst of times. In Liverpool, he spends a highly amusing hour playing an impromptu accompaniment to another young man's serenade of his girlfriend- apparently the means of apologizing after a tiff- and watches with a smile as the young lady forgives her fellow and kisses him to the sound of violin music and applause. In Eastbourne, at a Bed and Breakfast that affords him a room for a night even though it is the off-season, he plays old Irish songs for the widowed proprietress, who hails from County Clare, and together they mourn for those they have lost and reminisce about the land they'd left behind. In Birmingham, he plays Happy Birthday for a little boy with a cowlick and a bunch of red balloons.

At night, when he goes to sleep in a room in an inn or a hostel, he dreams about her, and recalls more snatches of memory. A kiss by a fountain. A swim under the moonlight. A slow, sweet smile with all the delicate radiance of sunlight on water. But it is now winter, and he has yet to find more of her than a face in his memories and a sonata in his dreams.

XII.

He arrives in Oxford in mid-December, and by the day that he first sets foot on the university campus, it is all but deserted. The graceful spires and quads are quiet, dusted with snow, and Zephan is a lonely figure as he follows a snow-covered path and an instinct that sends his heart stumbling.

His shoes leave faint impressions in the freshly-fallen snow as he walks into the Great Quadrangle, which is stately as a palace courtyard and silent as a cemetery. The skies are grey overhead, the winter sunlight pale and soft, and his eyes fall upon the fountain that is at the center of the Quad, the surface sheened with ice. A slim, graceful god with winged sandals and a caduceus, which in warmer weather would be surrounded by cascades of flowing water.

_Mercury._

He opens the violin case that he carries, though the weather is poor and there is little chance of drawing a paying audience in the solitude of the campus, and plays.

And for the first time ever, the bow moving over the strings as though on instinct alone, he captures the lush, melancholy harp melody that has been his most faithful companion in the last ten years of his life. The wind pulls strands of his wavy hair loose around his face, blows snowflakes to catch on his eyelashes, but he does not notice as the music travels the path from the deepest reaches of his heart and out through his fingertips, taking with it a heaviness that has weighed on him for as long as he can remember, and leaving a sense of freedom.

All at once he knows that he is not alone in the Quad, and opens his eyes. And even as his fingers continue playing, heartrending note after note hanging in the wintry air, his heart feels as though it has stopped. Right there, at the entrance of the Quad, in a coat of Oxford blue over a demure black skirt that flutters around her ankles, is the girl he has been searching for all his life. Green eyes lock with blue ones and time seems to slow to a crawl as she walks towards him, his suddenly-cold fingers faltering on a vibrato as the bow draws out the last note. Her skin is pale and flawless as the surface of a pearl. Her hair shimmers blue-black in the frosty sunlight. As he sets the violin down back in its case with shaking hands, he sees a few teardrops beading the sooty eyelashes that fringe those ocean-blue eyes.

"You're here. I was wondering when you would find me."

She wraps surprisingly warm, strong fingers around his own cold ones and squeezes. He can barely breathe around the lump in his throat. But the words must be said, even though his voice is barely over a whisper in the wind.

"Nothing I can do will atone for the past, for my betrayal of your love. I can never make up for it."

"You can try. We can try. We can take another chance." A tear spills over, slides down her cheek. Horrified, acting on instinct, he reaches up and wipes at it with his fingertips, then freezes as it dawns on him that he is touching her face as though they are still lovers and he still has the right. But then she smiles, and mirrors the gesture, reaching up to brush wayward strands of his hair behind his ear as they stand there together in the snow, in front of the Mercury fountain, and all the cracks in their hearts and souls begin to heal. He doesn't even know her name, and he has never been a cad, but his lips home in on hers like magnets with opposite poles, and when she sighs against his mouth, he crushes her against his chest and holds her like a drowning man might clutch a float.

Jubilantly and illogically, though it is the dead of winter, the water in the fountain comes to life and fills the air with its spray of rainbow drops and its tinkling music. As Zephan buries his face in her soft hair and feels the clench of her fingers around fistfuls of his shirt, the face of the god seems to smile in benediction behind the mist of water drops.

He is no longer lost, and she is no longer alone. Together, they are home.


	4. Book Four: Nephrite

A/N: And with this, the Tempus Fugit series comes to a close. Hopefully everyone has enjoyed it! This section was relatively more difficult to write, as there was a lot of research that I had to do, but hopefully the details come out as authentic and I do apologize in advance if I get something wrong! Anyway, thanks for the kind reviews and feedback! I must give out thanks to Tenebris for giving me a few pointers on Rez life in the American southwest, and also CBrandtwright for always listening when I need to hash out something or another.

Disclaimer: Same as always.

* * *

_All I need is my one star in the sky, to wish for you every day._

I.

T'Iis is twenty when she meets Jordan Stone when he stops in the Navajo crafts shop during a summer thunderstorm. They do not come often in Apache County, Arizona, and the handsome young man in the khaki uniform shakes his tawny hair out of his face as he smiles down at her and asks if he can wait out the rain on his lunch break. His eyes are the same colour as the turquoise beads in the necklace she is stringing, and his deputy's uniform is still so new that she can see the creases where it had been folded.

It happens so quickly, so fiercely, not unlike a summer thunderstorm. Before the rain even lets up, she has already agreed to go to dinner with him with no consideration for the tongues that would undoubtedly wag within the tribe. He smiles and the tips of his ears blush as he suggests a place, a small but fancy Italian restaurant that is slightly beyond his budget, but maybe somewhat worthy of the lovely, dark-eyed girl with strings of beads and silver glinting against her ebony hair. He can't quite get the intonation of her name right, and calls her 'Tess', and she smiles as the sun comes out and haloes around his wavy hair.

He's only twenty-two and his parents are baffled and outraged. Her tribe is suspicious and she is warned that no good can come of it. But thunderstorms are as strong as they are rare hereabouts, and not six months afterwards, T'Iis stands in City Hall next to Jordan as they swear to love, honour and cherish each other for better or worse in front of a judge. A strong-willed young girl. An idealistic young man. The judge exchanges glances with the sheriff who is Jordan's boss and makes a genial comment about Romeo and Juliet and young love after the short ceremony. But T'Iis and Jordan are too blissfully focused on each other to notice or care.

T'Iis gets a job at a local cafe waiting tables and they rent a tiny flat, hoping to save up for a house someday. They can barely keep the roof over their heads, and for their first Christmas together, they can only afford the tiniest, mangiest little plastic tree marked down half-off as damaged from the general store, but he greets her with a kiss every evening and she weaves him a blanket, in the old and traditional way, for cold nights. Perhaps they are foolish, but they get the gift of two years of perfect happiness.

When T'Iis finds out that she is pregnant, both of them are nervous but ecstatic, and Jordan makes her stop working doubles, get off her feet more. He buys baby books and takes extra shifts of his own; maybe by the time their baby is old enough to walk and talk, they'll have enough money for a little house with a real yard, perhaps be able to buy their kid a puppy to play with. When he comes home, often very late at night now, he heats up the dinner T'Iis always leaves him on the table and watches her sleep and dreams about little boys with his courage and her strength, of little girls with her hair and his eyes.

One night the call comes through just as he is about to go home. Domestic dispute, backup requested from all units in the area. Well. One more hour of work is one more hour of pay. Maybe with the next check, he'd buy their baby a crib. T'Iis - though he still calls her Tess- looks like a goddess. At the pre-natal appointment last week, the doctor said that they are having a boy. They still hadn't chosen a name.

The wind picks up and howls like an angry witch as he parks the cruiser and approaches the house of the domestic dispute, but he can still hear the screams of a woman, the wails of a little child, perhaps not too much older than the baby he himself will be having. Fearless, idealistic and perhaps more than a little foolish, Jordan kicks the door in without double-checking with dispatch or calling for back-up.

The gunshot hits him straight in the chest. He falls, a handsome, impulsive young man of not yet twenty-five, and even though the gunman is taken down by other officers within seconds, it is far too late. Jordan Stone is pronounced dead by the paramedics when the ambulance arrives several minutes later, and the sheriff himself brings his personal effects to a stoical T'Iis later that night.

She quits her job at the cafe altogether, sells the flat, and returns to the Navajo reservation with her plain gold wedding ring on her finger and Jordan's badge, the hammered gold star engraved with the words 'To Serve And Protect', in her pocket. Though several of the tribal elders shake their heads and several of the more tactless members of her clan tell her that she should have known it would happen, she is accepted back, and brought to the home of her mother.

It is during another rare summer thunderstorm that her son is born, and a flash of lightning illuminates his face as he opens his mouth to let out his first, lusty cry. T'Iis names the boy Niyol- for the wind. The wind had brought her happiness, and taken it away with the same abruptness, but with her son, she would always have both her joy and her grief. And when she holds her baby in her arms for the first time, and smooths her fingers over his fine, downy hair, she weeps.

"You come with the wind and the storm, and I am afraid that your life will be full of the same. Perhaps you will suffer, and be lost, and be afraid. But I hope that you will have the strength to bear it, and find enough joy in the end to be worth it."

Niyol frets and whimpers in her arms, and the storm seems to take pity and abate. T'Iis falls asleep quickly, worn out from grief and love and the exhaustion of giving birth, but the newborn stays awake, his fathomless eyes fixed on the dark night sky outside as the clouds clear to make way for thousands of stars.

II.

Niyol is raised by his mother on the reservation, in the traditional way of the Diné. From the ritual "Baby's First Laugh" blessing ceremony by the medicine man in the hogan at dawn to the history of the four sacred mountains that border their land to the legends of the coyote and beaver and eagle who had helped them build each of their successive worlds, he grows up being taught the importance of the way and the lore that runs through his blood. Though he attends Apache County's public schools during the day, he learns, in the evening, the rites and folklore of his mother's ancestors.

He is a gregarious, friendly little boy, with his father's quick grin and dense brown hair curling over his ears and his mother's dreamy dark eyes. Perhaps it is due to the fact that he does not quite fit in with the rest of the tribe that he befriends the wise, infinitely patient and tolerant medicine man rather than the other children. But certainly even the medicine man has no explanation for his dreams or visions.

He doesn't remember when he first started hearing the ethereal music of the stars, or noticing the patterns in the sky that recall the ages past and foretell the ages to come. He doesn't understand why he hears echoes of lost love and broken kingdoms late at night when he is at that edge between waking and dreaming.

He doesn't know any girls, either in school or on the reservation, who wear earrings shaped like pink roses and stare mournfully at him with eyes greener than the leaves of the sagebrush, but he sees flashes of her face- beautiful and vivid as a mesa sunrise- in his mind as though they have known each other for a thousand years.

III.

The medicine man is quietly dignified, eighty years old, with a leather-coloured face toughened and scored by the years and the strong sunlight and a rain of iron-gray hair. His name is Aditsan, the listener, and he is T'Iis' grandfather.

The story he listens to now is one he has heard before, certainly, as he has watched and cared for Niyol since the boy was born. Though Niyol has always been outgoing and fond of the company of others like any other boys in the tribe, he has a deep, spiritual side and a striking sense of intuition about the future, a deep understanding of the Earth and the sky. Aditsan, sensing his gifts, teaches him the chants and the rites, because their people will always need a healer and confessor, and he himself is getting old.

But now Aditsan frowns at the sandpainting that Niyol has made on the buckskin-lined floor of the hogan. The technique is flawless, the lines of sand perfectly formed. The scene is a night sky improbably filled with both stars and thunderbolts over two figures - a man and a woman- that reach toward each other. Since Niyol's youth, he has always spoken of the woman.

"It is like I was born with the ghost sickness," the young man- little more than a boy, really- murmurs at Aditsan's side. He is tall, and though his hair is also long, it falls in wood-brown waves. The face, one that smiles so easily, is drawn. "I don't even know who she is. But I must find her."

It is taboo for them to leave their lands, but then again, no traditional cure has been able to rid Niyol of these visions and dreams. Aditsan mulls it over as Niyol takes the gnarled hands in his own strong, capable ones.

"I am skilled with the animals, and I have a strong back, a good eye. I can find work."

Aditsan sighs, and nods his permission. "I will prepare for a Blessing Way ceremony."

IV.

Niyol does not have any clear idea of where to go, or what to do, and the stars overhead speak only in riddles. But he is young and determined and earns enough to keep food in his belly and the occasional roof over his head through any number of odd jobs as he hitch-hikes and takes the buses from city to city.

He arrives in Las Vegas a month after his twenty-first birthday, and meets the magician quite by chance at a blackjack table. Perhaps because it is his first day in the city of lights and sin, perhaps due to beginner's luck and the fading echoes of celestial advice, but the ten thousand that he wins after a mere few hours attract the magician's notice. The other man buys him dinner at the fanciest restaurant Niyol has ever dined in, and by the dessert course- fancy chocolate gateau drizzled with raspberry sauce and topped with tissue-thin curls of shaved white chocolate- Niyol is offered a steady job.

The magician's arts rely on deception, electronic machines that blow smoke and flash lights at opportune moments, and he does not believe that the stars are anything but balls of burning gas millions of miles away. He does not remember his dreams when he sleeps, but he is personable and charismatic and is in the process of coming up with his acts for a new show. Several of the stunts and tricks will involve animals ranging from the traditional white rabbits to peacocks to a powerful black panther.

Niyol fits the magician's bill for an animal handler in the entertainment business, with his quick hands and intuitive knowledge of nature and his dashing good looks, but he is told that he will have to go by the name of Neal for the sake of easy pronunciation.

Thinking of the opportunities he would have for free, comfortable travel and all the people - perhaps among them a girl with rose earrings and emerald eyes?- he would meet, Niyol acquiesces.

V.

The animals are kept in cages and special trailers, and despite the differences in species, Niyol- _Neal_- does not find the work any more difficult than raising and herding the sheep on the reservation. The big black panther, with its velvety fur and powerful legs and molten amber eyes, is tame enough to eat out of his hand, and though it communicates only with looks and responses to hand gestures and whistles, it is like a friend in this strange and hectic land. Its name is Jove, and something about that strikes a chord in Neal.

The magician's show is a stunning success on its opening run at the MGM Grand, and the end of the night finds countless bottles of champagne and endless rounds of congratulations in rooms filled with glittering lights of all colours. One of the showgirls- buxom, tanned, with a cascade of chestnut curls, flirts with him over alcohol and caviar. Neal is drunk and excited over the success of the show, but when she leans in to kiss him, he shifts away.

"Your eyes are not green. You're not her," he slurs in bewildered hurt. "I can't... it wouldn't be fair."

She must have gotten the assumption that he's speaking of a beloved, a girlfriend, someone whom he is in a relationship with and whom he knows as well as he knows himself.

If only it were so simple.

He stays away from the after-parties from then on and focuses on the animals. Jove may be fierce, but he will never have any ulterior motives.

VI.

The magician tweaks his show, lengthens it, and with the start of a new season, hires a new assistant for some of his fancier tricks. She is lovely, a curvaceous redhead, but something about her sends a shiver down Neal's spine. He avoids talking to her, a strange way to behave for someone so sociable as a rule.

He thinks that maybe the stars are warning him about her, about what is to come, but their portents are incoherent and muted like muffled screams. He starts losing sleep, waking up in the middle of the night shivering despite the dry heat of desert summer as images of the girl with rose earrings- dead, green eyes open and unseeing in an eternal accusing stare, a bloodied tomahawk embedded in the ground next to her- appear within his mind in grisly not-quite-flashbacks.

The night before the grand opening of the new show- entitled 'Master Chaos' Dark Kingdom'- he goes up to the observation deck on the Stratosphere casino, in a desperate attempt to get some answers from the stars.

But perhaps the flood of artificial lights that is Las Vegas is too strong, too bright. When he looks up and strains his ears, he can see and hear nothing.

Neal is quiet and withdrawn in the wings backstage as the audience begins filing in and the ushers guide everyone to their seats. He can feel the eyes of the redheaded assistant on his back as he talks quietly to Jove, who growls though he is fed and rested and in no apparent pain or danger. The sleek black panther seems to glare at him with its gold-coin eyes, but that might be a trick of the light.

The curtains go up and the show begins. By rote, Neal waits for his cue, as the eerie music plays and the smoke billows on-stage. The audience will watch as the magician locks up the redheaded assistant in a heavy iron cage, identical to the one that contains the black panther. A moment later, after a crack of lightning and thunder, the assistant will be free, and the panther will be in the cage instead.

The lightning flashes before his eyes, and Neal watches terrified as before his eyes, the redhead seems to morph into the panther- emblem of death to various tribes, he belatedly remembers- and spring out at him with claws outstretched and teeth murderously bared. A part of him realizes that this is not one of the tricks in the roster.

His head hits the wall as he backs away from the predator, and everything goes black.

VII.

He wakes with painful muscular cramps in what definitely feels like a bed, in a room bright with fluorescent lighting and nothing at all like the slightly seedy glitz of Vegas. Though it takes a while for him to focus his vision, it eventually settles on the statuesque form of a woman standing by the window. The setting sun throws her face into shadow, but she cuts quite a figure, wearing a strange sort of outfit that consists of knee-high boots and an eyebrow-raisingly short black pleated skirt under a white nautical top accented with red bows. The outfit is skimpy, but something about her air- stern, remote and somehow all-knowing, differentiates her from any of the showgirls he has ever seen.

"Who are you?"

"You can call me Pluto," the woman replies, and even in a city of aliases and artifice, the name seems like a strange one. She turns her head slightly to glance at one of the machines that he belatedly notices attached to his body. "Your heart rate is normal. That is good."

"What happened to me? Where am I?"

"You suffered, among other things, a severe electrical injury, some physical trauma. You will probably notice some cramping, some tingling in your limbs, though that may go away in time. You have a few scars from electrical burns, but you are lucky that there is no extensive neurological damage or deep tissue trauma that would require amputation. As for where you are..." She pauses and steps forward, and Niyol notices that her face is beautiful, olive-skinned and fine-featured. "You are in Kindred Hospital, in Nevada. It is July 23rd, 2010. Happy twenty-fifth birthday, Niyol Stone." She smiles faintly at the look of surprise that crosses his face. "You're very lucky. You have been given a second chance, and you will heal. Remember that."

For some reason he senses that she does not simply speak of his injuries and the fact that he has apparently been asleep for four years. But before he can ask, she walks out of the room, shutting the door silently behind her, and he is left staring at the space she occupied.

Through the open window, however, comes a breeze that smells strangely of sweet summer roses, and as the sky darkens with night, he can see the stars. He feels something wanting- some atonement that must occur- but it is still a comfort.

He lets the familiar, welcome music of the stars lull him to sleep.

VIII.

The woman who calls herself Pluto gives Niyol both good news and bad with the sort of quiet fortitude that means a lot more than sympathetic platitudes. She brings him news that the magician, along with his menagerie of animals and his redheaded assistant, is long gone. In this world of transitory partnerships and fair-weather friends, it is no more or less than Niyol might expect. She also tells him, however, that his initial winnings at the blackjack table all those years ago had been invested on his behalf, and while he is not rich, he has the means to start anew with his life should he wish.

Niyol lies in bed that night, awake and alert, as thunder rolls in over the desert and rare rainfall patters against the window. He will always have faint, circular scars on the soles of his feet where the electrical current grounded itself, and perhaps his fingertips have lost a little bit of their original sensitivity, but he has recovered with remarkable speed since he'd awoken. It is now September, nearing the Autumn Equinox, and a summer storm not unlike the one that accompanied his birth thrashes the air outside.

He cannot see or hear the stars in the face of the thunder and the rain, but he already knows what he must do.

Perhaps the woman called Pluto can read minds, or perhaps she, like him, has ways of deciphering the lines of destiny and fate. The day that the hospital gives him a clean bill of health, she visits him and patiently listens to his plans, though not all of them are fully formed or carefully plotted, and does not look skeptical when he murmurs something about a lost girl who he has only met in dreams. When he finishes talking, she smiles a mysterious, all-knowing smile, and slides something towards him across the nightstand.

It is a bus pass, not unlike the many he had purchased back in the day before everything fell into disarray. Somehow, that she'd anticipated him does not surprise him at all. He glances at the writing on it, the information that he would be taken back to the reservation of his childhood years, then looks up to find her gone.

When he leaves the hospital, it is nighttime, and he pauses to look up at the stars. "Thank you," he murmurs up at the black velvet sky, and hopes that the woman called Pluto will hear him somehow.

IX.

The four mountains that border the Navajo Nation remain unchanged, imposing and eternal and unspoiled as they have been for thousands of years. There are a few new faces, and a scattering of new houses and roads as the bus drives through Apache County, but Niyol recognizes his home and makes his unerring way to the traditional hogan with the eastward-facing door.

Aditsan the medicine man looks up, and though his hair is snowy white now, his back bent with age, he clasps the younger man's hands strongly in both of his own.

"You have not found your ghost girl. And yet you have returned."

"I won't be able to find her until I am worthy of her," Niyol answers quietly. "She deserves nothing less than a man of honour."

"I will perform the Enemy Way ceremony," Aditsan remarks, not unkindly. "In the event that there are any demons and skinwalkers that have attached themselves to your body while you were beyond the mountains and need to be exorcised."

Niyol nods. "You have my thanks. I will cleanse and prepare myself. And afterwards, I will see my mother."

X.

Perhaps it is the Enemy Way ceremony, or perhaps just the familiar land that surrounds him, but when Niyol walks out of the hogan three days later, he feels refreshed, lighter somehow. Though several had shunned him in his youth, and certainly might look askance at his decision to leave the tribal lands in pursuit of a ghost from a dream, a surprising number of people give both him and Aditsan support and encouragement during the ceremony.

T'Iis, like she had all those years ago before her fateful meeting with an idealistic young deputy named Jordan Stone, weaves blankets and makes jewelry at the craft shop. Niyol walks in, meets the eyes of the still-lovely, strong and steadfast woman who gave life to him, and takes her in his arms. She is smaller, frailer than his memories, but she beams when she looks up into his face.

"You have become a fine man," she declares, brushing his long, curling brown hair away from his face with slender fingers callused from loom-work. "Strong and courageous and wiser than your years." The smile widens, though there is a soft note of sorrow in it. "And you have the look of your father, aside from your eyes. He always put others first, gave his time and energy and life to help those around him. He loved you before you were even born."

"I won't shame him," Niyol promises as he holds her tightly.

That night, as the stars shine and sing their whispered hymns overhead, she gives him Jordan's badge, the hammered gold still polished to a gleam after all the years that have passed. In T'Iis' eyes, Niyol sees a glimpse of grief, but also deep, abiding, faithful love. In the same box where she keeps the badge is a faded photograph, taken by the sheriff of Apache County at a City Hall so many years ago, as a tall young man and a willowy young girl kiss in front of a judge. Niyol picks it up, sees himself in both their faces.

"Love can happen in a moment, and last for lifetimes," T'Iis murmurs, looking at the photo herself as she stands next to him. "We were happy. I will never be sorry for what time we had."

The words invoke the strangest sense of deja vu, and the porcelain-bell peal of the stars rings louder. And then his eyes fall onto the badge itself, the words engraved on the gold star.

_To Serve And Protect._

_"I, Kōmokuten, Lord Nephrite of the North American Kingdom, swear my allegiance to the Elysian Heir and the Golden Kingdom of Earth. For as long as I shall live, I shall serve and protect my Prince, my country and my people."_

Riddles unravel and the patterns in the sky suddenly become crystal-clear. He stares down at the golden star, thinks of the thunderstorms that always seem to bring difficult but everlasting love, and remembers.

XI.

There are promises to be kept, and more than ever he understands the need to make atonement. He gets in contact with the sheriff's department and the Navajo Nation council, purchases a small, ramshackle house on the reservation and uses the money he has saved to renovate it, add on a few outbuildings, repave the roads around it. The land surrounding him is rugged and somewhat desolate, but overhead, the stars shine bright and unimpeded.

Over the winter, he spends his days herding sheep for the tribe and rescuing injured and displaced wildlife. Through the Christmas tourist season, he provides free water and cheap provisions to people passing through, gives directions and tips to campers. He helps a stranded young man with a flat tire get his car back on the road, then discreetly helps him find and purchase an engagement ring for his girlfriend from T'Iis' craft shop.

In the springtime, a riot of wildflowers bloom around his hut- Earth's blessing, perhaps. He sees the pink cactus flowers and snowy white phlox and fiery Indian's paintbrush and feels, for the first time in memory, at peace.

It is a week before the start of another summer that he receives an invitation to a wedding in the mail. The young man he'd helped in the winter invites him to Tokyo for the ceremony and reception. It is the city of the lost time, the place of his missing memories and the people he only knows from flashbacks of lives before.

Niyol takes it as a sign.

This time, when he asks for the medicine man's blessing before he leaves, he does not go as someone lost, someone adrift in a storm, haunted by ghosts. He leaves secure in the knowledge of where he is going, of what he will find, and when he will return.

Carrying his father's gold star and wearing one of the rings that his mother had fashioned, he boards the plane, and watches through the window as it ascends towards the stars.

The sky is clear and there are no storms in the horizon.

XII.

It is like a different world when he steps out of the airport. The city is crowded, frenetically modern in a completely different way than Las Vegas, and he stands out in the crowd of suited, laptop-toting businessmen and decorous, chic girls in fashionable summer dresses. Niyol takes a cab to his hotel, then calls the soon-to-be groom.

"I am very happy that you made it here safe," Motoki's voice is as happy-go-lucky as it had been when they'd met in Arizona. "Reika was so pleased with her ring- the uniqueness of it, the traditional design. Her exact words were that anyone can have a diamond solitaire. And if you hadn't helped me that day, I might have not made it to her campus on time at all."

Niyol smiles at the other man's transparent, shameless happiness, but knows that somehow, helping Motoki out was the least he could have done. As Motoki waxes on about his bride-to-be's perfections and his happiness, Niyol silently recites one of Aditsan's blessings for the happy couple, and nearly misses the other man's question.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You haven't eaten yet, right? Reika wants to meet you. There is a very nice restaurant- quite new, opened by a dear friend of mine- called Flower Storm. Would you like to meet us there in an hour?"

He agrees, and changes into a suit. The clerk at the front desk gives him directions to the restaurant- walking distance, with spectacular desserts and an excellent wine selection- and he shakes hands with a beaming Motoki and a lovely brunette at the door. Reika, who had gone abroad to study Geology and Physics in California, speaks flawless English and asks him all about the ways of the Diné.

The wait staff are efficient and seem to know the happy couple very well, and the meal- from the smoked salmon canapes to the Italian cream cake- is delicious and exquisitely presented. They pass a pleasant hour like a group of good friends and are lingering over coffee when out of the corner of his eye, Niyol sees a young woman in a chef's apron walking towards them, white hat set over auburn curls, and every single cell in his body goes on alert.

"Mako! A delicious meal, as always," Motoki effuses, then pauses when he sees his guest and his old friend staring at each other like ghosts. Confused, he glances at Reika, then at Niyol. "I did not know that you knew each other."

Niyol is on his feet and at her side, blind and deaf to everyone else, and doesn't hear Motoki's question. She has a faint smudge of flour over one cheek, and her eyes are wet and green as dewy grass. Rose-shaped earrings twinkle against her slender neck. She is neither holding flowers nor calling down thunder, and when a smile gradually curves across her lips, his heart almost stops from her beauty alone.

"Forgive me," he whispers, taking her hands in his larger ones. "_Ayóó ' ánóshní_. I love you. I never stopped." A tear escapes and slides down her cheek, and he reaches up to brush it away. "You're the stars in my sky, the rain that sometimes comes to the desert and leaves it forever changed. I've dreamed about you for as long as I have had dreams."

She smiles, radiant as the summertime, and loops her arms around his neck. He kisses her lips, sinks his fingers into her chestnut curls, and it feels like a lightning strike to the heart. Neither are aware of Motoki speculating to Reika that Makoto always did talk about a _sempai_ whom she had never stopped loving.

Much later, in a room lit only by starlight streaming through an open window, he strokes his fingers through her silky hair as she sleeps in his arms. The stars' music sounds like a symphony of celebration as their master reunites with his beloved and everything comes full circle. Niyol thinks of his mother's words, of love that can come in an instant and last for lifetimes, and pulls her closer. Her hand rests, quite naturally, over his heart.

It is as it should be, and he will rest without ghosts haunting him that night. And when he does dream, it will be of a future, a time of peace, a second chance. Eternal love, promises kept, a little girl with her smile and his eyes.

After the storm, the calm.

He falls asleep smiling.


End file.
